Dictation Machines > Philips Dictation Machines

Pros and Cons of the Zoom H4 Portable Recorder

Advantages: Fantastic Recording Quality, Rugged design, Various Inputs, Lots of Bonus features.
Disadvantages: Fiddly Menu Navigation, Battery Life.

...lessons. At first glance the Zoom offers many useful features such as AutoGain adjustment, various effects to play with, phantom power, and the various inputs supported which allow virtually any instrument to be recorded. These are all let down slightly by the irritating jogger button navigation which is used to navigate nearly all of the menus on the device. That said, once a certain amount of fiddling and tweaking has been done to set up the H4, ...
...out! Overall, the Zoom H4 does what it says on the tin very well - the recorded sound quality is fantastic, and its very light and portable. The only downside seems to be the daft jogger button which is used to navigate all of the menus, but this shouldn't put you off buying a very powerful recording tool. ...

steffanc 28.10.2009 · Read full review

Review of Zoom H4 Handy Recorder

Liston to your own voice on the cheap...

Advantages: Easy to use, good price and masses of space
Disadvantages: sound quality if you want to listen to music from the single speaker

...When I purchased my Sony ICD-B500 digital voice recorder from www.amazon.co.uk I managed to get it for just under £18.00, but as I look on the site now, I see that the same device is on sale for nearly £25.00, so I think I got a real bargain, although at £25.00 it is still worth investing in if you want a cheep form of extra memory without the need for writers cramp. The only slightly negative side to this unit are probably the speaker sound, which ...
...made the recording, closeness to the microphone, background noise etc.etc. But as you shouldn’t really need to play your MP3 songs out of it then the sound quality wont be a problem as you can clearly hear you recorded voice. But apart from that I can’t think of any other negatives about this low price little gem, I’ve even dropped it a few times, accidentally of course, and this little flimsy looking gem just keeps on ticking, so to speak. If ...

blissman70 05.07.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Sony ICD-B 500

Not for distances

Advantages: Cheaper than others on market
Disadvantages: Sound quality low, long distances barely picked up, battery life short

...And it was this. The Sony ICD-P520. I found after an entire year of use that there were several problems with this product. Without an external microphone, often the voices of lecturers not more than 3m away from my desk were drowned out by the noise of paper shuffling and murmered voices in the background. These microphones cost about £20 and shouldn't have been a necessity. Not only that, but the dictaphone was battery draining beyond expectation. ...
...software NOT provided by the Sony website to access recordings. You *cannot* lose the software and driver CD. But the advantages of this software is that it allows you to save these recordings as pretty much any file format you need to. As well as this, the software is NOT mac compatible. That's right, the ever growing numbers of people opting to choose Mac OS are excluded in one swoop by Sony's lack of accessibility. Now that I've tackled the problems ...

fimsy 24.09.2008 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Sony ICD-P 520

OLYMPUS VN-3100

Advantages: Record upto 36 hours, digital sound quality, compact device with mic
Disadvantages: Microphone not as effective as I thought

The Olympus VN-3100 is known as a Dictation Machine, but I like to simply call it a portable voice recorder. In size it is not very big, thus being portable. It measures in at a length of 10 cm, a width of 3.5 cm and an overall depth of 1.7 cm. The top end of the the device has a depth of 1.3 cm and the bottom end which contains the batteries has a depth of 1.7 cm. The device is made in China, like many things are nowadays. The Olympus VN-3100 does ...
...to reveal the batteries. The OLYMPUS VN-3100 takes standard AAA batteries. In the box you get: - USB Cable - Microphone - Software CD - Manual - 2 AAA batteries The provided Microphone is supposed to reduce background noise levels when recording. I have used the microphone and have to say I cannot tell the difference between a normal recording and a recording with the use of the microphone. The OLYMPUS VN-3100 is compatible with Windows 2000/XP/VISTA. ...

yassarikhan786 26.04.2008 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Olympus VN-3100

Do you use you dic ta phone?

Advantages: Great recording and playback quality.
Disadvantages: Too complicated and 'busy'.

I bought this dictaphone (sorry, digital voice recorder) last year as I needed to record a client session to use in a supervision session, i work part time as a therapist. I had an old dictaphone which really was not that good at playing back anything legible, so I thought, hey ho, run it through my books (I am self employed) and I've got it for keeps, £30 did not seem cheap, but it does seem to be of good quality, good build and a reliable name ...
...and plastic with a handy pen like catch to attach to clothes if needed, and also comes in the box with a clothes attachable microphone, and an ear piece. It weighs, with batteries, 2.4 oz, and is similar in size and shape to a mobile phone, 9.5 cm long, 3.5 wide and 2cm deep. The small screen digital display is easy to read, if a bit 'busy'. Also in the box is the 'set up' CD, USB to device cable, and instruction booklet. The instruction booklet ...

paulhanton 24.03.2008 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Olympus VN 480PC